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Presidential candidate John Kerry has a "faith-based initiative." This news was a shocker to me. Has Kerry adopted the wedge used by right-wingers to crack the wall of separation between church and state?

Both religious and secular people support that wall and have for over 200 years. Maintaining that separation frees religious organizations from government strings.

Kerry's approach is different, though, from the current "faith-based initiatives." The Democrat proposes a plan focused more on technical assistance and training for religious groups to help them obtain the federal grants available while still keeping religious activities separate and free from government control. He proposes finding ways to team government and religious groups in ways that preserve rather than weaken the U.S. Constitution's integrity.

Through all of this he proposes safeguards to ensure that public funds don't pay for building churches or for buying religion-focused teaching materials.

Most importantly, Kerry says he will recraft the current executive orders that expose churches and religious organizations to legal challenges on constitutional and civil rights issues.

One problem remains unaddressed. "Faith-based" initiatives embed a faulty assumption. They assume one group has faith and the other group lacks faith. This couldn't be further from the truth and distorts the real constitutional problem.

Even those people implied as faithless actually have faith in the consistency of nature and the laws of nature. The problem isn't in the presence or absence of faith but in the natural influence that attends any kind of funding. If a charitable group accepts public funds it cannot avoid a subtle amount of governmental control, which is clearly wrong for church-based groups.

Kerry is once again patroling dangerous borders. Rather than doing what most of us would do, reject any form of connection between church activities and government services, he explores the question of whether there exists some way to form valuable partnerships with non-governmental service agencies to achieve greater results even when the private partners are religious groups.

The loaded and inaccurate term "faith-based initiative" should be left behind. It was created by a spin machine of the neo-conservatives. The proposed partnerships should be simply public/private partnerships with specific safeguards and rules in place whenever the private partner is a religion-based group.

On the other hand, I'm not sure a need has been demonstrated to form these partnerships at all. The mission of government social programs is to create economic opportunity and increase access to freedom. Most private charitable programs have other goals that center around relieving suffering. They are related goals but very different missions.

Using public funds to assist private charities confuses these different missions and pretends the differences don't matter. Just as we shouldn't hire a private army to defend our country, we shouldn't hire private charities to implement our social programs. Instead we should commit ourselves to fund the programs we need to provide economic, medical and other social services needed to secure our nation's freedoms, while at the same time applauding the charitable efforts of private organizations.

posted by Unknown at 11:42 PM